Censorship
Censorship is the suppression of ideas or news sources in mass communciation or of products bearing ideas that are deemed objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or otherwise inconvenient by political, economic or cultural elites with the power to coerce its removal or marginalization. Examples * July 14, 2016 Bnai Brith Canada uses terrorist baiting in attempt to silence pro-Palestinian Canadian teacher Nadia Shoufani. * 2016: Turkish news sources adopt a studied patriot silence by Israeli arms shipments to Azerbaijan. * On March 24, 2016, journalist Florence Hartmann is arrested and sentenced to a jail term for revealing in a 2007 book and 2008 article the names of judges on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia who she accused of improperly and unlawfully striking a deal with Serbia aimed at denying victims of mass atrocities access to information critical to their ability to obtain reparations for crimes committed against them and their relatives. * University of California at Davis awarded a $15,000-a-month contract to a PR firm to eradicate references to the pepper spraying of Occupy protesters on Google, including “negative search results” for Chancellor Linda PB Katehi. Money down a rathole that could have been better used to educate. * In a March 30, 2016 article on the extrajudicial execution of a wounded Palestinian prisoner by an Israeli solider, The New York Times agreed to abide by an Israeli military censor's order not to publish the soldier's name. * In 2014, the Associated Press may (repeat may) have agreed to submit its Pyongyang bureau's work to a North Korean censor. This echoes the agreement of the Associated Press to submit its reporting from Nazi Germany to that government's propaganda ministry. * Republican Florida Gov. Rick Scot banned Florida state officials from using the terms "global warming" and "climate change" in official communications. The orders have been issued verbally to avoid creating a paper trail. Florida state officials charged with responding to climate change have been compelled to use absurd euphemisms such as nuisance flooding to identify the banned truth. * Purdue University President Mitch Daniels admitted on Friday July 21, 2013 that while (Republican) Governor of Indiana he worked to prevent liberal historian Howard Zinn's work from being taught in Indiana schools. * The State of Louisiana attempted to obtain an court injunction against Moveon.org's billboard message about Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal's opposition to extending Medicaid coverage that parodied the state's multi-million dollar tourism brand. The state must promote tourism with tax dollars because the private sector is incompetent and or unwilling to do so. See Billboard Slamming Bobby Jindal's Medicaid Opposition Can Stay, Judge Rules Ashley Almand. Huffington Post. April 7, 2014. (Try to imagine the small mindedness of the politicians who tried to do this!) * Al Jazeera was largely shut out of the U.S. news media market by the refusal of an oligopoly of cable television providers to carry it. Only in a handful of U.S. news media markets, in Ohio, Vermont and Washington, D.C., do cable carriers allow viewers access to Al Jazeera. As the old adage goes: the press is free...if you own one. The exclusion ultimately succeeded in driving the Al-Jazeera America network to cease broadcasting. * Montreal Police arrested 20 year old Jennifer Pawluck for posting an Instagram image of graffiti depicting a local top police officer with a bullet in his forehead. Canadian Woman Arrested After Instagram Post Critical of Police RT. April 5, 2013. * In mid-May 2012, the owners and operators of TED chose not to post online a brief March talk by Seattle venture capitalist Nick Hanauer argued that wealthy investors do not actually create jobs and that broadly distributed middle-class prosperity does create jobs. Heresy is usually met with censorship, with its from the state or hegemonic private interests. The Class That Dare Not Speak its Name: The Talk Deemed Too “Political” for TED. Chris Lehmann. June 19, 2012. * In 2011, several major american supermarket chains responded to a Mississippi based priggs One Million Moms by banning Ben & Jerry's Schweddy Balls Ice Cream. * In 2009, the Zionist front group FLAME (Facts and Logic About the Middle East) launches campaign to silence the Berkeley Daily Planet for publishing an article by an Iranian student critical of Israel for its brutal invasion of Lebanon by pressuring advertisers to drop their ad buys. The campaign succeeds in eliminating the print edition of the newspaper. * The press in the Austro-Hungarian Empire refused to publish what was common knowledge about Hapsburg dynasty Emperor Franz Joseph, that he had kept a mistress named Katharina Schratt for three decades. Illogic Some conservatives argue for censorship using a version of the logical fallacy called the argument from adverse consequences. For example, on pages 108-109 in his anti-Darvinian evolution book, Darwinian Fairytales, David Stove writes the following: : "It is impossible to deny that, in this respect, Darwinism has a closer affinity with national Socialism or Marxism than with onfucianism or Buddhism. Darwin told the world that a "struggle for life," a "struggle for existence," a "battle for life," is always going on among members of every species. ...I is perfectly obvious that accepting Darwin's theory of a universal struggle for life must tend to strength whatever tendencies people had beforehand to selfishness and dominaeering behavior towards their fellow humans." Then on pages 109-110, he writes: :: "It is perfectly possible, of course, and indeed it constantly happens, that publishing a certain proposition is an incitement to crime, and yet that the proposition is a true one. If a large amount of money, or drugs, or firearms, is unprotected at a certain place, and I publish this truth, then I incite to crime: indeed, "the greater the truth, the greater the incitement." This is merely an instance of what every sensible person knows: that there are truths which morally ought not to be told to children, to the moribund, to people whose sanity hangs by a thread, or to the criminally inclined. So I do not mention Darwinism's being an incitement to crime as a reason for thinking that it is false. I mention it as a fact worth knowing, which is almost never stated, but is, very often indeed, concealed by people who know it perfectly well." The authoritarian conclusion Stove would have readers draw is that Darwinism should not be taught because it increases tendencies toward egoistic behavior, with Nazism and Marxism being its large scale manifestations. What is odd is that he mentions Marxism, which denounces egoism, rather than libertarianism, which enshrines egoism. American History Censorship is an old story in the United States. It began with the Alien and Sedition Act signed by President John Adams. Established by President Woodrow Wilson with an executive order during the First World War, the Committee for Public Information operated a pro-war propaganda campaign that demonized Germany as intent on world domination, spread false war atrocity stories and engaged in "discreet censorship of alternative points of view." (Jenkins 2002: 15). Sources * Dominick Jenkins. 2002. The Final Frontier: America, Science, and Terror. London: Verso. * David Stove. 2006. Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Gene, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution. New York: Encounter Books. * Carl Sagan. 1995. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House. (argument from adverse consequences logical fallacy on pages 212-213) External Links * Travels with My Censor Peter Hessler. The New Yorker. March 9, 2015. Links * Karl R. Krawitz * Gary Mason * Political Lexicon * Media Blackout